Mary, Mary: Rathergate producer Mapes and CBS News
By Nicholas Stix
web posted December 13, 2004
A few weeks ago, at Rather Biased, I came across a story about
a CBS News producer who'd been fired,
"CBS Fires Trigger-happy Producer." "So, they finally got
around to Mary Mapes," says I. No such luck. The tarnished
Tiffany network had unceremoniously dumped a news producer
for interrupting a broadcast of its popular new crime series, CSI:
New York , for a report on the death of Arab terrorist Yasser
Arafat. It seems while honesty in reporting counts for little at
CBS these days, hot entertainment properties are sacred.
The November 13 Rather Biased dispatch follows:
"Friday both Reuters and Broadcasting and Cable magazine
reported that CBS has fired the producer it blamed for
preempting the network's popular 'CSI: New York' show to
announce the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
"According to Reuters, the yet-to-be-named female producer
ignored ‘explicit, advance instructions' that the official news of
Arafat's death was not to interrupt regular programming. She
also allegedly ignored CBS standard procedures which require
the consent of a News Division executive to sign off on all such
preemptions.
"The former CBSer is said to have been a producer at the
network's insomniac news program ‘Up to the Minute,' which is
used as a proving ground for young and inexperienced staffers.
"The firing is the second step the Viacom-owned web has taken
to atone for its sin against its hot property ‘CSI.' Earlier in the
week, CBS posted a message of apology on its web site and
emailed a similar one to its affiliates.
"While the network's decision to apologize and fire the offending
producer has raised eyebrows of some viewers, we suspect that
most people would support the decision given that the news of
Arafat's passing was not exactly a top concern of Americans --
particularly of those who had deliberately avoided the cable
news death watch by watching an entertainment show.
"Like many of our readers, however, we do wonder why the
preemption of 'CSI' is an immediate firing offense at CBS while
deliberately ignoring warnings about forged documents in a
blockbuster story is not."
Granted, the producer had violated a direct order not to interrupt
the show without the permission of a superior officer. TV
executives may have contempt for the military chain of
command, but have zero tolerance for insubordination on their
own turf.
Mary Mapes is the CBS News producer who most recently
brought us the Abu Ghraib and Rathergate stories. The Abu
Ghraib story presented American soldiers in charge of a section
of the Abu Ghraib military detainee facility reserved for terrorists,
as if they were torturers and war criminals. The story, which was
reported separately by Mapes for CBS News and Sy Hersh for
the New Yorker, represented in both cases an instance of
defining journalistic deviance down. Hersh and Mapes both
sought to recreate the scandal of Vietnam's My Lai massacre,
but without the massacre. This is what happens when journalists
go from seeing themselves as patriots supporting America , as
they did in World War II, to seeing themselves as
revolutionaries, destroying her, as they have since the War in
Vietnam .
In Rathergate, Mapes used forged documents in an attempt to
cost George W. Bush re-election, by presenting the then-Texas
Air National Guard officer as a shirker, as insubordinate, and
possibly even a deserter who succeeded only through the
intervention of powerful friends.
Mapes' source for the forgeries, Bill Burkett, a former Texas Air
National Guard lieutenant colonel with a longtime, public grudge
against the Bushes, argued in his defense that he did not seek out
Mapes; she sought him out. (Burkett has also denied that he
produced the forgeries, though no one has been able to find the
mystery woman that, he claims, gave him the forgeries.) At the
time, CBS claimed Mapes had been "working on" the story for
five years, yet she had nothing to show for it, prior to Burkett
giving her the forgeries. And in spite of CBS News' document
experts having doubts about the documents' authenticity, Mapes
rushed the story onto the air four days later.
The September 19 New York Times quoted Mapes' executive
producer, Josh Howard as saying, ''Mary Mapes told us her
source made her completely confidentabout where they came
from, and that they were authentic, and that made me
confident..."
In an earlier, pre-TV era, Mary Mapes would have been fired
for even suggesting the Abu Ghraib story to a major newspaper's
editor. Prior to the War on Terror, it was unheard of to take
minor excesses and seek to impugn and risk the lives of America
's soldiers, let alone to seek with a hoax to cost a wartime
president the White House. And yet, prior to Rathergate, Mapes
was one of CBS News' most respected producers.
(There is, however, an earlier case of the media seeking to cost a
wartime president the White House with a true story – the
Pentagon Papers case from 1971, involving Pentagon official
Daniel Ellsberg, the Washington Post, and the New York Times
during Richard Nixon's first term of office. Ellsberg broke the
law, in leaking classified documents to the above-named
newspapers. The same members of the SMSM who consider
Ellsberg a hero for his leaks, have sought to have White House
officials imprisoned for legally informing columnist Robert Novak
that the wife of Nigergate fraud Joseph C. Wilson IV, Valerie
Plame, is a CIA employee.)
Jailhouse Rock
You may be wondering if perhaps Mapes' misconduct was the
product of an anti-Bush newsroom hysteria that gripped the
socialist mainstream media (SMSM) during the 2004 campaign.
After all, she couldn't possibly have been so respected at CBS
News, if she had a history of dishonesty … could she?
Well. As Fox News reporter Brian Wilson revealed on
September 22, Mapes had been reprimanded three years earlier
by J.E. Gunja, the warden of the federal prison in Florence, CO,
and stripped of her journalistic privileges regarding prisoner
Peter Langan.
"In the letter, Warden J.E. Gunja spells out a scheme in which
Mapes agrees to help secretly pass information between
convicted white supremacist Peter Langan and another federal
prisoner.
"‘Phone monitoring reveals that you agreed to this request ...
This investigation was based, in part, on inmate Langan's
admission to this attempt,' Gunja wrote.
"‘Your attempted misuse of the special mail privileges placed
members of the public at risk,' the letter reads…."
Mapes may have seen what she did in Colorado as merely
cutting a deal with the prisoners, in exchange for access.
Apparently, it didn't occur to her, that federal prisons are not her
personal playground. And had the information that Mapes
passed between Langan and the other white supremacist been
part of a criminal conspiracy (like, say, murder), she would have
been an accomplice. Heck, she could have been prosecuted, in
any event. Had an ordinary American been guilty of the same
offense, I can assure you, he'd end up in the dock.
Note that, following the same m.o. as in Colorado, Mapes gave
Rathergate hoaxer Bill Burkett access to DNC flack Joe
Lockhart, in exchange for Burkett's "documents."
Now, Mapes has gone too far, even for an era which has seen
the mainstreaming of treason. The only way to really unearth the
Rathergate story, will be for a federal prosecutor to subpoena
Mapes, Burkett, Lockhart, CBS News anchor Dan Rather,
CBS News chief Andrew Heyward, DNC chairman Terry
McAuliffe and perhaps others, in a criminal probe. Since Mapes
and Rather were involved -- willingly or no -- in a felony, they
can no longer hide behind the First Amendment.
The Producer as News Auteur
Producers are arguably the most powerful figures in TV news
magazine journalism; they decide what stories are run, and they
usually research and write them. Because of their status and
behind-the-scenes role, they have either not been reported on,
or have been presented as heroes (e.g., former 60 Minutes
producer Lowell Bergman in the movie, The Insider). Mary
Mapes should change all of that.
In a richly informative yet succinct article in the September 27
Chicago Tribune, "The Dirty Little Secret of TV
Newsmagazines," John Cook interviewed longtime TV news
pros on the role of the producer on TV news magazines like
CBS' 60 Minutes, ABC's 20/20 and Prime Time Live, NBC's
Dateline, etc.
"'Producer' is one of the most ambiguous terms in television
news,' said Mark Feldstein, a professor of media and public
affairs at George Washington University and former investigative
producer for NBC News and on-air reporter for CNN. ‘The
dirty little secret of television newsmagazines like "60 Minutes" is
that the producer is really the journalist who does all of the
important editorial work. The on-air correspondents at these
prime-time newsmagazines are largely front people. They
parachute into the story."
News stars like Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, et al., then are
essentially actors in a drama created by a producer who
functions like the movie director of auteur theory who has total
creative control over a picture.
"'It's really a misnomer,' said Tom Yellin, a former ABC News
producer who now heads up Peter Jennings' production
company. ‘You're really talking about producer-director-
reporter-writer-researcher.'"
Feldstein observed that the producer conducts most of the
interviews, and Cook noted that the producer will usually write
the script that the "reporter" reads aloud to the audience.
Rathergate was, however, an exception to the rule. As the Wall
Street Journal's John Fund wrote on October 4,
"Mr. Rather has acknowledged that he was deeply invested in
the story, and when he learned Ms. Mapes had gotten the
documents from Bill Burkett, a controversial former National
Guard lieutenant colonel, he asked Mr. Heyward to take charge.
In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Rather quoted
himself as telling Mr. Hayward [sic], ‘I have to ask you to
oversee, in a hands-on way, the handling of the story.' According
to Mr. Rather, ‘He got it. He immediately agreed.'"
Rather and Heyward supported the story, based on their long
acquaintance with Mapes, and their respect for her
professionalism and character. Let's get better acquainted with
that professionalism and character.
Same as She Ever was
Mary Mapes got her start in the news business at CBS' Seattle
affiliate, KIRO. One of her early stories involved a 1987 police
shooting of a black drug dealer. As John Fund chronicled,
"The [Erdman] Bascomb shooting angered many people in
Seattle , and officials quickly organized an inquest. Then KIRO
aired an incendiary story titled ‘A Shot in the Dark,' in which a
previously unknown witness named Wardell Fincher accused the
cops involved in the raid of lying. He said he saw officers arrive
at the house, burst in with no warning and shoot Bascomb, who
might not have even known the intruders were cops. The story
shifted to possible criminal wrongdoing by the police. Mr.
Fincher was summoned to the inquest, and previous witnesses
recalled. The reporter for the sensational segment was Mark
Wrolstad, now a reporter with the Dallas Morning News. The
producer was his wife, Mary Mapes.
"Fortunately for the cops, Mr. Fincher wasn't the only one at the
scene of the raid that night. A reporter for the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer, Mike Barber, was tagging along with officers. Mr.
Barber observed the officers arriving at the house, knocking,
announcing themselves and then entering. He was there when the
shooting happened and when the ambulances were summoned.
At that point, a man 'reeking of alcohol' walked out of some
nearby bushes and approached him. He wanted to know what
had just happened. That was Wardell Fincher. But Mr. Fincher
wasn't thoroughly checked out, so all this came out after the
story aired. The police were eventually cleared but it took years
and an unsuccessful civil-rights lawsuit by the Bascomb family to
undo the damage.
~~~
"By that time, Ms. Mapes had left Seattle, and no one I talked
with who worked at KIRO at the time can recall her being
disciplined in any way for her mistake. Instead, in 1989 she was
fast-tracked to the 'CBS Evening News' and later became Mr.
Rather's hand-picked producer on ‘60 Minutes.' 'Maybe the
National Guard mess would never have happened if she had
been handled properly back then,' says one former KIRO
reporter who still admires her work ethic and ability to break
stories."
The admiring former KIRO reporter's attempt to find positives in
Mapes' career reminds me of the rationalizations some New
York Times staffers gave for the rise of Jayson Blair, because he
supposedly "broke stories." Frauds like Jayson Blair and Mary
Mapes don't "break" stories, they make them up.
Let's see what some bloggers had to contribute regarding Mary
Mapes' professionalism and character (a tip of the hat to
Michelle Malkin).
Random Nuclear Strikes
On Friday of last week, Seattle 's own John Carlson, of KVI
570 fame, got wind that Mary Mapes was involved in this latest
crapfest [from] the MSM aimed at GWB.
Mapes is from the Seattle area and has worked in the local
media. She worked at the same broadcasting station [KIRO] as
Carlson did in the early 1990's, and Carlson shared some
anecdotal stories of having to deal with Mapes as a co-worker
on a day to day basis.
Let's just say that the stories weren't pretty. But they were funny.
Mapes thought of Reagan and GHWB were evil incarnate and
said so on several occasions. When confronted with evidence of
a mistruth spoken during a water cooler debate or pertaining to a
mistake she had made in reporting a story, her usual MO was to
say "oh well" and walk away.
AnalogKid at Random Nuclear Strikes:
I remember Mapes as a race baiting reporter who specialized in
waiting until the local NAACP officials released a statement
about police shootings and then start demanding what she called
"justice" in her own special way.
Anywho, if she thought GHWB was evil incarnate, it isn't a
stretch to think that she'd go anywhere or do anything to kick
evil's son out of the White House...
You have to bear in mind, that there are thousands of Mary
Mapeses out there, destroying people's lives for the sake of
power, money, prestige, and the desire to bring down America .
Every time I hear the phrase "liberal bias," my blood pressure
goes up ten points. We're talking about Marxists here, folks.
Perhaps the worst indictment of Josh Howard, Dan Rather, and
Andrew Heyward, is that they had confidence in, and respected
Mary Mapes.
Ruthlessness ain't Always Bad
Mary Mapes is clearly a ruthless individual, and yet, unless one
would shut down all news media, one must realize that merely
being ruthless is not in itself a vice in the news business. In fact, it
is a virtue, if you want to read and see great true stories.
The public's discontent with the media is not monolithic; it has
several roots. One such root is the dominant SMSM's leftwing
bias and increasing practice of fraud. Another is the related but
not identical feeling that the media have contempt for the
predominantly Christian folks in "flyover country" between the
media subculture's landing zones in New York , Washington ,
DC, and Los Angeles . Though Republicans would have you
believe that such contempt is limited to the SMSM, I think much
of the Republican mainstream media (RMSM) is guilty of it, as
well. "Flyover country" is more a mythic than a geographic
notion. To media types, places like Queens and upstate New
York are also "flyover country." A third, related source of
discontent arises from journalists' ruthlessness in joyfully
destroying the lives of ordinary people.
The problem in journalism isn't ruthlessness per se, but what kind
of ruthlessness. Sources do not just appear on a journalist's
doorstep every morning, dying to blow the whistle on corruption.
But a journalist who can't cultivate sources, won't report many
great or even good stories. And most people's complaints about
the media notwithstanding, they WANT those stories. Big stories
entertain readers and viewers, elevate their feelings of superiority
over the "bad guys," permit them to feel pity (i.e., more feelings
of superiority) for the "victims," feel fortunate ("There but for the
grace of God go I"), give them something to talk about with
family, friends, and colleagues, and help them make sense of the
world. And smaller, blood-and-guts stories fulfill the same
function, though not as powerfully, because they are usually
briefer. As the TV news saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads."
Let's look at some ruthless but honest reporters, from
journalism's past.
Chicago, Chicago
In Richard Ciccone's biography of the legendary Chicago
columnist, Mike Royko: A Life in Print, Ciccone tells a succinct
yet vivid history of the hard-charging, hard-drinking, violently
competitive tradition of Chicago newspapering that Mike Royko
(1932-1997) in many ways embodied, and which may have died
with him.
"Newsmen often participated in investigations rather than
reporting on them. When a fugitive wanted for murder in Illinois
was captured in Wisconsin , the Examiner reporter at Chicago
Police Headquarters notified his desk that the cops were taking
their time selecting a team to go collect the suspect. The
Examiner sent its own team, which arrived at the small Wisconsin
jail, flashed a few phony badges, picked up the murder suspect,
returned him to a Chicago hotel, and had his interview all over
page one the next day. Only then did they turn him over to
police.
"When the first ‘Crime of the Century' took place in 1924, two
brilliant University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and
Richard Loeb, were the key suspects. Police took them along
the route the young victim, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, had
walked the night he disappeared only to be found the next day
bludgeoned to death, his naked body dumped near a railroad
culvert. In the car with the suspects and police were two Daily
News reporters, who did most of the interviewing.
"A sensational murder did not have to take place in Chicago for
Chicago newsmen to scoop the world. Two of the ‘telephone'
legends of American journalism worked for the Hearst papers.
In 1934, Harry Reutlinger, city editor of the American,
telephoned America's greatest hero, Charles Lindbergh, at his
Hopewell, New Jersey, estate and became the first reporter in
the country to verify that the aviator's infant son had been
kidnapped and that a ransom note demanded $50,000 for his
return. No one knew how Reutlinger got Lindbergh on the
telephone. He may have said he was [President] Franklin
Roosevelt. A few years later, Reutlinger got a big beat when he
made a ship-to-shore call to the burning luxury vessel Morro
Castle off the New Jersey coast. Identifying himself as the
owner, he convinced a young steward to supply him with all the
details of the fire and had an exclusive in print before the New
York papers, which were only a few miles from the scene.
"Reutlinger posed as a policeman, a sheriff, a coroner, or anyone
else who could help him get the story. His successes were
remarkable, because on another floor of the Hearst Building at
326 West Madison Street was an even more practiced
telephone magician, Harry Romanov, the Examiner city editor.
"Collier's Magazine named Romanov as the world's greatest
telephone reporter. Once he posed as the police commissioner
and got through to a hospital where several dead and injured had
been taken. The man who answered the phone provided all the
details Romanov asked for and then said, ‘If you will get a paper
and pencil, I'll give you names, ages, addresses, and extent of
injuries of all concerned.' Romanov was so astonished at the
degree of cooperation he was receiving that he blurted, ‘Who is
this anyway?'
"‘Police Commissioner Fitzmorris, Romy. I knew you'd be
calling.'"
Is This the End of Caesar?
Any day now, the CBS News internal Rathergate report will be
completed and read by the executive suits in the executive suites
at CBS' "Black Rock" fortress. When Rathergate became a full-
blown scandal, CBS appointed former U.S. Attorney General
and liberal GOP Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh, and
former Associated Press chief, Louis Boccardi, to investigate the
matter. When the report comes out, Mary Mapes will likely be
fired.
As Rather Biased reported on December 7, in "Mapes's Last
Stand,"
"Mapes has been acting very much to save her professional skin,
writing up a 68-page statement in her own defense and
repeatedly lobbying the commission to persuade it of her view
that the documents which she obtained from a Texas Democrat
with a history of mental problems could be true in spirit, if not in
fact."
She's still arguing that the story is "fake but true." What do
detectives always say? "Criminals are creatures of habit."
To reiterate, what makes Mary Mapes bad news is not her
ruthlessness, but her willingness to hype stories (Abu Ghraib) she
has no business telling in the first place, and in other cases (the
1987 drug shooting, the Rathergate hoax), her willingness to
spread lies, in order to harm those she hates.
And the problem with the Mary Mapeses of the world, is not
limited to the phony stories they broadcast, but the countless true
stories they squelch or ignore.
Dan Rather has announced that he will retire as evening news
anchor on March 9, his 24 th anniversary on the job as Walter
Cronkite's successor; pc understudy John Roberts is his likely
successor. Andrew Heyward, who will likely be fired along with
Mapes, will be replaced by one of the usual suspects, possibly
Jeff Fager, who vouched for Mary Mapes' character.
And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program.
Nicholas Stix can be reached at Add1dda@aol.com.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com